Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.

AG

It was an interesting learning session - it gave me a more structured approach to gamification concepts which I can further use in Human Computer Interaction / User Centered Design approach in UX.

SJ

Jan 04, 2016

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Insightful course, widens your horizon of thinking. After completion of this course I was able to understand and create many engagement activities in my profession of a Human Resource Officer.

From the lesson

Deconstructing Games

What exactly does it mean to apply game design principles in non-game contexts? In this module, we'll discuss how game designers approach their craft, and how to see any situation through the lens of game design. Then we'll examine the raw materials of games and gamification, known as game elements. We'll earn how to break down a game into its constituent parts and apply them to create gamified systems.

Taught By

Kevin Werbach

Professor

Transcript

I've talked some now about what gamification is and about what games are. It's time to get into the challenge of thinking like a game designer. Understanding problems through the lens of, what I call, game thinking, the core skill for gamification. And I'd like to start doing that by posing a fundamental question. Why gamify? Why would you even think to take a site or a business process and try to make it more gamelike? If you're interested in some serious results and achieving some real world series objectives. So lets look at an example, and try to think about why gamification made sense for this service. The example is dodgeball. Dodgeball was one of the first successful smartphone applications. It was developed by a group of graduates from the Interdisciplinary Technology Program at NYU. And these guys like to hang around in bars, so they built an app for people who like to hang around in bars. Here you see a screenshot of the WebClient, and dodgeball gave you this map that showed you where you were. And then you could check in, and say, here I am, I am at this location right here. This bar that's on this street. And then you could see where your friends were. Where other people were who were using the application where they had checked in. And this got some notoriety, started to get some pick-up in New York and San Francisco and places like that. And in fact, Google bought the company. But dodgeball had a problem. The problem was that it's a chicken and egg situation. If lots of your friends are on dodgeball, and there's lots of check in that you can find, then there's a great incentive for you to check in as well. You want to get access to all the information, you get a lot of value from seeing all of your friends. And you know they will get value from seeing what you're doing. On the other hand, If you go to dodgeball and there's a blank map, not too much reason for you to bother checking in. So how does the service get to critical mass, get above that level where there's not enough activity to get people involved? So that was one of the basic challenges that dodgeball had. After leaving Google, Dennis Crowley, one of the founders of dodgeball started a new company that had a fairly similar basic structure. It involved going and checking in on a mobile client at locations that you would go to. But this time, his new company Foursquare, implemented what we would now call gamification. So think about why would Foursquare use gamification? What are some of the aspects of this service that we saw originally in dodgeball that might lend themselves to a gamified approach? There's a number of different things that you might come up with and there's clearly no right answer. But let's think about some of the aspects of this problem that might make gamification appropriate. The first is that dodgeball had what we could call an engagement gap. It needed to get more people to engage with and use the service. And making the service fun, making the service feel more engaging and gamelike is certainly a more powerful way to do that. The second is that dodgeball didn't have a lot of variety in it. Basically it was check in, or don't check in, and again you could get some analytics or information, as well as seeing where your friends were checking in. But there weren't too many different things to do. And when things are unitary like that, where it's either do something or don't do something, it doesn't tend to engage people as much unless there's some very direct result that they get. If it's go to this website, click a button by this product then you can see the relationship. But if it's not that clear, if there's some value in the exchange, but it's not as direct having options, having choices, as we talked about in discussing games as meaningful choices, could potentially make the experience more popular. The next is that dodgeball didn't really have any progression. Check in or not, you really didn't get anywhere by virtue of what you did. And so checking in the hundredth time was kind of like checking in the first time. Again, limited the motivation of players to want to participate actively in that system. The good news is that dodgeball was a very social application. It involved relationships with your friends and social interaction is very powerfully tied to games. Because we love to compete against our friends. We love to collaborate and share and team up with our friends. We love to have status vis-à-vis our friends, and also see what our friends are doing. And so all of that is potentially quite consistent with a gamified approach. And finally there was an opportunity with a service like dodgeball to make the action a habit. If you have to think each time, I better get out my phone and go and check in, you're not going to do it all that much. If it's habitual, if it's just a natural thing that you do. You just kind of automatically when you go to a new bar or a club or a restaurant, or even one that you've gone to many times before, you just pull out your phone and check-in, then you're much more likely to do it. So the challenge for dodgeball and for its successor Foursquare, was how to make this action a habit. Something, again, that is very well-suited to games. Which create this environment that encourages people to come back and come back. So those are a few of the reasons that I think gamification seems to make sense for Foursquare the successor service to dodgeball. So let's look at what Four Square did. The most prominent thing that it did was implemented a concept called mayorships. So if you check in the most times out of everyone who's checked in at that particular location, [SOUND] you're the mayor on Foursquare. And here you see the badge. Badges is another aspect of gamification in Foursquare I'll talk about. This is the badge that you get for being the mayor of ten locations at the same time. It's actually the super mayor badge. But it's a representation of that achievement of becoming the mayor. And Foursquare built a system that made it very easy to notify your friends on Twitter and Facebook that you'd become the mayor of a place. Who you've displaced as the mayor. It created this friendly competition, which made the act of checking in something more fun and something that had more of a reward to it. Not necessarily a monetary reward, although some venues do give incentives to people who are mayors. But a reward in that you see something and other people see that you are on top, when you become the mayor of a venue. Simple but potentially valuable use of gamification and then Foursquare built a whole, other set of game mechanics around this check in process. So this was a screenshot from the Foursquare page of Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare. And you see a variety of data points about what he's done, and then, here on the right, you see the badges. Badges were an important element of what Foursquare did. They allow them to create much more richness of the service. Remember, I said choices are important, and progression is important. Badges gave all sorts of options. Again, it's still just checking in, but now checking in becomes a much more variated kind of activity. It depends where you check in. If you check in at a certain place, like a health club, you get a badge. If you check in at a health club a certain number of times, you get another badge. If you check in at say a conference, like South by Southwest, there's special purpose badges you get that you can only get there. So suddenly, this one act of checking in becomes something that seems very rich and complex and nuance for the users. It also is something that allows you to level up. So Foursquare implemented different levels within their badges. So checking into an airport gives you one badge, but checking into 20 different airports, say, gives you a higher level of that badge which is harder to get. And these are all examples of game mechanics built around the basic process of checking in. Did it work? Well, Foursquare now has over 20 million users. They've raised over $70 million in venture capital, valuing the company over 600 million. And they've successfully overcome challenges from major companies like Facebook that got into this social location marketplace. Now Foursquare still has a long way to go, and correlation isn't causation. That doesn't necessarily tell us that the game mechanics was the reason for their success. This is something that we'll come back to later. But it's worth thinking about how the gamification that Foursquare implemented ties back to the challenges that they faced. So consider how gamification addressed the engagement gap, the desire for habit formation. The need for more choices and more progression, and taking advantage of the social dimension of what Foursquare was doing. That's the kind of thought process that you need to engage in in approaching problems through the lens of game design.

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